Optimize your business case strategy for accelerated transformation

How does your organization build business cases? What gets included in them? How are they evaluated and approved?

Most importantly, does everyone in your company use the same processes, offering a standardized approach enabling visibility and accountability across each case type

Business cases are the raw material for enterprise success. They fuel your journey to transformation. Yet for some organizations, optimizing their business case strategy means tackling big challenges.

Consistency

The first step is ensuring that your business cases are evaluated and approved using a common set of processes.

Many companies have shaped their own unique approaches to business case approval over the years. Most have inconsistency at every stage. Informal processes are often part of these unique solutions: not easily repeatable from one business case to the next.

The weaknesses are clear from the start. Most organizations require some kind of written submission, with spreadsheets and presentations attached. Documents are usually in an unspecified format, however, and payback is often calculated using whatever measurements best support the case. Estimates for resource required, and timelines for project delivery might well be optional.

The submission package is then emailed to BU managers and finance for approval. At any point in this correspondence, the attachments can easily be lost or edited beyond recognition.

These are messy processes, and the risks to the business are real. Without common formats, inclusion types, and approval methods, accurate assessments of each business case is impossible. Great ideas and projects will be lost, and bad ones will get approved.

Visibility

Communication and information visibility is just as critical for an effective business case strategy. Understanding financial and resourcing requirements and risk is imperative for effective execution.

Without transparency, for example, project managers are only too likely to hear that a major project has been approved for execution without any involvement in planning.

Stakeholders might be thinking about the big business picture, but have no sense of the resource utilization required, or the multiple risks involved in execution. If the PMO cannot see what is going on, the business exposure can be serious. Increasing the likelihood of failed projects, inefficient resource utilization and fatigue.

Ownership

The great test of visibility is: ‘who’s got the ball?’. Does anyone know what happens next between the manager who submits the business case, finance department who approves the budget, and the PMO who has to execute the project?

Without clarity of responsibilities and commitment to timelines by key players in the cycle, opportunities can be missed, and wrong decisions made.

edison365businesscase

Built on Office 365, edison365businesscase gets things done better and faster, with less risk. It tackles consistency, ensuring standardization and accountability across repeatable processes for all types of business case – whether new innovation idea or typical project approvals. It provides organization wide visibility, with an intuitive interface that delivers a compelling user experience.

Unlike the ERP and bespoke platforms that many organizations depend on for managing business case approvals, edison365businesscase is designed for mobile devices using Windows, iOS®, and Android™. Users can access business case information on different devices and browsers to suit their personal ways of working.

At a glance

edison365businesscase offers a rich array of visual tools. One glance at Quick Stats, for example, provides a snapshot of business cases recently added, how many of them are under review, and what the approval status is.

You can drill down into each open business case, color coded according to status, find the people involved, and check out where the case is in the cycle. You can easily edit an open business case, co-authoring with others, assured that the latest version is safely located in edison365businesscase, not hidden away on someone’s hard drive.

Building a new business case is straight-forward, too, using a standard Word format. You can add attachments from your normal office apps: SharePoint, Excel, Yammer, PowerPoint.

Users can see the metrics that each business case is judged by, the resources required, risks and issues, timeline for delivery, and the costs estimated by capex and opex – or other expenditure types and dates.

Innovation enabler

edison365businesscase delivers the tools needed by business stakeholders, innovation leaders, the PMO and senior leadership teams. It works for any size of enterprise.

It is part of the proven edison365 suite, which includes edison365ideas and edison365projects modules. edison365businesscase offers the critical link between the other two modules.

It enables innovation and ideas from employees to be effectively evaluated before project implementation, helping organizations pave a pathway to true transformation.